Issue 024
April 2007
If you’re lucky enough to have been sat next to a ring or cage at an American MMA event, you may well have seen a bespectacled figure taking photographs. If he is sporting a trademark backwards baseball cap, then chances are it is none other than Jeff Sherwood, founder of the famous website www.Sherdog.com.
If you’re ever googled a fighter’s name then it is almost certain you’ve had a look at his fight record on Sherdog.com. This massive website holds the details of almost every professional MMA fighter on the planet, and along with a store, a forum and many other features, it has become immensely popular, placing 2500th in the rankings of the most popular websites in the world. In fact, Sherdog.com is actually the number one MMA website in the world.
Started in 1996, the site came from humble beginnings. “Mainly it was just about the UFC, that’s pretty much all we knew back then,” says Jeff. “It was just a fan page, I put it on a free server, and I didn’t pay any attention to it because it was just a hobby.”
Jeff maintained the site in his spare time, often tinkering with it during breaks at work. “I was working for Boeing in the electrical department. In my down time I would play with the site. I was at Boeing for four or five years, it was when I left that I really concentrated on the website.”
Sherdog.com can now provide Jeff with an income that supports his family (he is a father of three, aged 11, 9 and 7) yet for years Jeff worked all hours to bring the Sherdog store to life, a popular place for all manner of MMA shopping needs. “I did the store by myself for a long time, while I was still working. I did that for three years, now the store has two people running the distribution full-time.”
With the services provided by Sherdog passing beyond that of just a fan page reporting MMA news, Jeff took it up a gear once more by providing ringside coverage of major events. “I went to events and after a while I decided to take photos. I dug out an old camera I had, and I took thousands of horrible photos; I had no photo training at all!” Sherdog now employs photographers in America, Japan and Europe, with Jeff leading the way as senior snapper.
Though the website bears his moniker, this isn’t a one-man show, as Jeff’s long–time partner and friend Garrett Poe was instrumental in developing the website. “Around 1998 I took a partner on board, Garrett Poe. We’re totally different people. I’m more of a fan, he’s more of a business guy. The fight finder was his idea – when he said ‘we’re gonna go back through all these old fights and create a database with the results’, I told him he was crazy, but look at it now. He had the internet knowledge, that’s what he brought to the table. All the Google rankings and stuff, that’s all Garrett.”
With a team of contributors and employees who are responsible for the site and the store, Jeff (who is first and foremost a fan of the sport) isn’t going to put his feet up and watch things grow. “I’m still working away, I don’t know if I ever want to kick back. I love going to all the shows and taking pictures. I’m still really involved with the day to day running of the site.”
One such involvement is that on the newly created Sherdog radio show, ‘Savagedog’. “We started with ‘Beatdown’ [Sherdog’s radio show, which began broadcasting in 2005]. I had known [host] TJ De Santis for a while, he had been bugging me for ages to do a radio show.” Now you can hear Jeff on air as a presenter with his long-time friend Greg Savage, downloadable every week from the website.
Where did he get the name for the website from? “A guy I played baseball with in High School called me Sherdog. I didn’t really put a lot of thought into it [choosing the website name]. I’m really happy we used it, it’s such a unique name, I think when people say it now, it’s just attached to MMA. I think it’s perfect, and it wasn’t even planned.”
With two and a half million hits every month Sherdog’s popularity continues to grow alongside that of MMA, but will there come a time when things will level out? “I think about that a lot because it directly affects the business so much,” says Jeff. “I’m not sure how much bigger [MMA] can get, I mean, what’s left?” He does think that there is more TV coverage available, but other than that he wonders if things have peaked, although he continues to be surprised. “When we get the traffic stats we always think ‘this is it, it can’t get any bigger’ but things continue to grow.”
With such a popular website and lucrative business in his hands, Sherwood fields many offers from parties interested in purchasing what began as his pet project. “We get offers all the time, at this point its not something we’re interested in. We’ve had people say ‘yeah, we love it, but we want to change this and that’. That’s not going to happen. If someone was to buy it, I’d want to be in it 100%, and my people in it too.”
